The Sexuality of Semantics: How the Jamaican Public Makes Every Word Pubic!

Have you ever noticed how... Jamaicans "sexualize" every word... veggie/vaggie... pork/pokey... Boy don't make any mistake and ask for Coco Bread at the shop. Other words like wood, rod or plank means penis... pole etc...

Think about it for a minute: hole, pot/pat hole, hold u, squeeze... quint, squint, cat, pussy, all have vaginal references... in Jamaica words mean 1 of 4 things... penis, vagina, oral sex or anal sex/batty man business... This horror and tragedy is not subject to words, but numbers as well... look at the much maligned 2, once a symbol of balance and duality and harmony and such... now! Look at 666... what an evil number, do we even know why? 

The animals are in uproar too... Richie Spice, one of my all time favourite artistes... "seh nuh styles me as dawg, dawg a sittn shit a people yaad" and Dawg seh nuh styles man as me... mi nuh shot mi bredda and abandon mi pickney or mek nuclear weapon fi destroy earth... and Cat objects to being the symbol of all vaginas and cowards, (by the way, where did we even inherit this disgust for vagina... men are pussies, go suck yuh ma pussy... yet we all born from it as men and spend our lives going back there).

Almost the entire sea community is in uproar about us land lubbers use of the word fish... not to mentions horses and donkeys pissed at what we call ass, chickens that make a daily task of standing up to chicken hawks and mongooses and rid our yards of forty legs... are hurt that we call cowards, chicken... as if a species that has to live off domesticated animals and is afraid to hunt... has the right to call them cowards...

I am through talking in patwa and english... too sexualized and we cast the worst aspects of ourselves and human psyche on the animal kingdom... mi need a new mental space... more linguistic freedom... a place where being a cunning linguist has no punny punishment or consequences... mi done... Rosetta Stone here I come... SWAHILI... AMHARIC... ARAMAIC...AFRIKAANS... new mission #OccupyAnotherLanguage

THE MINISTER OF FREAKONOMICS: LISA HANNA

How Can a Youth Minister Support Abortion?

May, Child's month not even fully a month behind us, and our Minister of Youth is endorsing eliminating youth... it seems somewhat absurd, if not paradoxical.

This reality reveals much of what is wrong with public policy discourse in modern Jamaia. Our politicians lack character, insight and vision, that is why they will endlessly regurgitate white America's intellectual drivel. A 10 minute Google would have shown our dear Minister of Freakonomics that the abortion-cut-crime theory has not even come close to meeting the burden of proof, but, instead, she like a lot of  our nation's intelligentsia fell inlove with the theories perpetuated in the book Freakonomics by Donohue and Levitt. Being innumerate, most politicians, presstitutes and the punditariat are willing to dupe the proletariat, the masses. It is easier to simply engage in intellectual yes-man-ship and take a guru figure like Levitt on faith, than even ask a local statistician or economist. A few book reviewers, like James Q. Wilson (America's leading expert on crime for several decades), expressed deep skepticism about the books propositions.

It amazes me that in todays day and age, an influential person such as our Minister publicly endorsed the theory, when a bit of diligence with Google would have shown her it was dubious, if not racist and prejudice.

It is an attention-grabbing theory, to be sure, possibly even more noteworthy than recent research indicating that liberalizing abortion increased pre-marital sex, increased out-of-wedlock births, reduced adoptions and ended so-called shotgun marriages.

But a thorough analysis of abortion and crime statistics leads to the opposite
conclusion: that abortion increases crime.

There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term.

A theory such as the one by Ms. Hanna has far reaching social, political and moral implications and, as such, needs to be rigorously debated and researched. The intent of this letter is to illustrate that, although the abortion-crime theory gained much attention and popularity in the United States, Donohue and Levitt’s findings are not apparent and obvious, nor are they indisputable, hence ought not to be taken as fact.

The criticism of the book's conclusions need to be given as much attention and consideration as the findings and arguments originally put forward in the book. Indeed, much of the research done after Donohue and Levitt’s study was published disproves the abortion-crime theory and casts serious doubt on whether such a link exists at all. Since then several times in articles, Donohue and Levitt acknowledge that a number of factors may have contributed to the falling rates crime rates during the 1990s. So why do we follow blindly American schools of thought?

Indeed many in the academic community contend that Donahue and Levitt’s research suffered from methodological flaws. As The Economist noted, “Donohue and Levitt did not run the test that they thought they had.” Work by two economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, found that, when the test was run correctly, it indicated that abortion actually increases violent crime. John Whitley and I had written an earlier study that found a similar connection between abortion and murder — namely, that legalizing abortion raised the murder rate, on average, by about 7 percent.

We need to be doing our own research and not slavishly following North American trends of thought.

LIJ TAFARI - ON (MOBAY)

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